In the two years since the Office of Personnel Management revamped how the federal government posts job listings and accepts resumes online, USAJobs.gov has received more than 130 million unique visits and 1.5 million new resumes.

This success came as agencies moved slowly to integrate their back-end systems with the new Web site despite a cloud, in the form of a contract protest, that hung over the e-government project.

But the uncertainty that some agencies felt should be gone now, as OPM has settled -- at least for the next few years ? on Monster Government Solutions to run the USAJobs.gov portal.

OPM in late July awarded the New York company a five-year contract that could be worth up to $27.1 million. The contract replaces the original $62.1 million award to Monster that was protested by Symplicity Corp. of Arlington, Va., in January 2003.

The Government Accountability Office sustained Symplicity's protest, but OPM decided against recompeting the contract until Congress threatened to withhold future project funding.

OPM released the new request for proposals in July 2004, and it took about a year to award the new contract.

"In the case of Monster, OPM was happy with its performance in the previous contract and, based on its overall proposal and price was well in alignment with what we were paying," said Ron Flom, OPM's procurement executive.

A spokesman for Symplicity, one of two losing bidders for the contract, expressed disappointment over OPM's decision. The spokesman said Symplicity's price was close to $13 million less than Monster's and that their proposal was technically acceptable.

"We will be interested to see how OPM will justify this expense, especially with the budgetary pressure e-government is receiving from Congress," the spokesman added.

Dan DeMaioNewton, Monster's project manager for USAJobs.gov, said the re-award of the contract will resolve any concerns agencies had about integrating with the USAJobs.gov Web site and let the company move forward quickly with technology innovations.

"Job seekers will be able to see the status of their application across all agencies," DeMaioNewton said. "There haven't been any agencies that have successfully integrated that into USAJobs. It is not hard to do, but given all we've had to do, it just hasn't been achieved yet."

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